Every Field Into Stone
by FigureofDismay
Summary: Elizabeth Scott is less than a month from her seventeenth birthday when the warning comes. Katya is alive, and searching for her daughter. Red's empire is stable but new and untested. At the center of it, Liz is on the cusp of adulthood, torn between the safe and familiar and her longing to meet the mother she never knew her fascination with the dangerous stranger in their midst.
**full summary: "** Elizabeth Scott is less than a month from her seventeenth birthday when an old friend of her father's appears with a warning of an imminent threat. Katya is alive, and searching for her daughter. Raymond's empire is stable but new and untested. At the center of it all is Lizzy, on the cusp of adulthood, torn between the safe and familiar, her loyalty to her father and her longing to meet the mother she never knew, her fascination with the dangerous stranger in their midst."

 **this may very well go over like a lead balloon but my tenderness for and fascination with Teenage Elizabeth has had me planning this fic for ages. Eventual Lizzington. NO underage or barely of age material. Title from Kate McGarrigle's beautiful _Proserpina_ , which has always been my anthem for Lizzy and her mother.**

* * *

When Elizabeth was four her birth parents were killed in a house fire. She had always known this. When she was old enough, Sam held her hand and gently explained some of the details, but she had never had any doubt that they had died, and how. She has no memory at all of them, or that night, but she dreams of fire climbing the walls, the fluttering beauty of it, the way everything turned black and crumpled up ahead of the advancing flames, the terrible smell and the terrible fear and the complete immobility of her body while the fire creeps and eternally creeps. She isn't sure if the dreams come from memory or her imagination, but they leave her sitting up in bed, shivering with terror.

When she was small, maybe five and six, and she and Sam still lived in Aunt June and Uncle Danny's big house with the clear story windows, there were nights that she would avoid sleep altogether. Gripped with a certainty, at least one night a week, that that was the night that the fire would come again, or that some other disaster was about to befall them all and she had wanted to be prepared. She would get quietly up again after Sam had tucked her in for the night and settle on the end of her bed with her bunny and her backpack, containing whichever were the childish treasures most precious to her that day and a change of clothes and some snack or other stowed inside, in her slippers and jacket. Just in case.

Sometimes she would go and peer out of her door, up and down the long hall at the closed doors of her cousins' bedrooms, worried she should warn them as well. But equally she was afraid to make any noise at all, for that would surely trigger the calamity. Then she would pace back to her little bed, to doze sitting upright and fidget and worry. And so she would wait out the night, until the sky in the high up narrow windows above the ruddy gold curtains showed bluer and bluer and brightened with dawn, and at last she would shed her protective layers and climb in bed, knowing the danger, however illusory, was passed.

Sam knew about these nights, of course, found her sitting up and waiting more than once, and had told her over and over to come and get him if she was afraid or if she woke up. Told her that it didn't matter if he was asleep, she could always come to him and he would make sure she was safe. But he could never draw her to speak about it, or the fire that she feared, or whatever it was that lurked within the fire that scared her even more. She had no words for it. She didn't understand it herself well enough to speak, and some voice in her warned with iron-cold finality, that to speak would be to doom them all.

She doesn't remember much else about those early years with Sam besides waking from those nightmares and those nights of waiting in the little bedroom that had been her cousins' play room before she and Sam came to live with them. Some good things too, she supposed. Sitting on Sam's lap and listening attentively as he explained the alphabet and the vowels and diphthongs and consonants of familiar children's books to her. Getting to play with cousin Nick's big plastic car that she could sit in and push oh so fast with her feet. She scoured hard for those better times as she grew and the memories grew foggy and reduced to the soft wash of the emotions they provoked. But mostly it was those nights, and the strength of her childhood terror confused and alarmed her as she looked back on it.

As suddenly as a light being turned off at the switch, the nights of mute waiting in dread ended, and the nightmares diminished to something like a yearly occurrence. It happened round about the same time as she and Sam finally moved out of his sister and her husband's big rambler and into an apartment in the city. Sam had got a new job, one that paid much better, he'd told her, and those days were all a blur to her. She was half sure that something else had happened around that time, something important, but she could never remember and Sam only ever said that they'd needed to be nearer to his work so they'd moved in a hurry.

She thinks later that it was only right that she have that old dream again, fire and a frozen fear, on the night before it all began. Like her body had known, or something deep within the locked and bolted place of her mind.

She'd thought of none of it in so long. Ten years had passed since those nights she'd paced in the room with the narrow brass bed and the ruddy gold curtains, and she'd come gradually to disbelieve that those nights were real. She was a good student then, and eager to keep the special privileges that she'd finally wheedled from Sam. She didn't worry about nightmares anymore, she did her homework and went to bed on time.

And then the dream had come and shaken her in it's jaws, in the white and black endlessness of the middle of the night until she woke with a choked off cry. In the morning she awoke again, bleary and aching as if with fever from her fatigue, and shuffled downstairs to find a strange man sitting with her father at the breakfast table. And somehow, without ever being sure quite why, she knew immediately that something had gone terribly wrong.

* * *

Things had been pretty good for a while. She'd been unobtrusively present at school, and she'd been sailing though her homework, it was hardly an effort to get it done before going down to her dad's office to man the phones. That's about all that he allowed her to do, but she'd had her license now for getting close to six months and if she made it to that mark without incident he'd promised she could go and run little errands for him and Vic on the weekends sometimes. They needed someone to play the hapless intern and-or assistant sometimes, for one, and she'd made her case quite strongly. She was looking forward to it, had practiced her wide-eyed bewildered look in the mirror until she had it down.

She'd learned at last how to duck most of her school friends' invitation to parties or double dates at the burger joint that was the local teen hotspot with only minor pangs of guilt and regret. She'd known most of the current crowd ever since she and Sam moved to the suburbs from the city apartment when she was eight, and she was still fond of the girls she'd been in ballet class with, the boys she'd taught to play poker instead of UNO, but the longer she'd known them, the more she'd realized that her interests were different than theirs, her ambitions were different, and so were the secrets that she guarded close. Taylor Hadlow for instance, with whom she'd been inseparable in fifth grade and still sat with at lunch from time to time, kept three boyfriends, bought her english essays off of Jason Baranski and got drunk with Sasha Myles and Doug Woods at Homecoming. Elizabeth, however, knew how to pick locks and pockets, knew how to evade a stranger following her, knew how to read the occupations and natures of the people around her with a shrewd eye — had been made to memorize, since she was twelve, a string of phone numbers to call in case something always unspoken but awful and irreversible happened to Sam and she needed help.

Her life was different than theirs, and their placid faces and idle questions and seemingly pointless entanglements and disentanglements frustrated her. So she began to let old friendships fall by the wayside in favor of learning card tricks from Vic and hanging out with Suzanne, Sam's sort-of girlfriend, in Sam's office instead. She's happier there, anyway, she feels less like she has to pretend. Except to her dad, who didn't like to see just how much of his business she knew, like frequent reassurance that she was college bound, heading up and out of the shadows.

In short, her life in eleventh grade had settled into a delicate kind of status quo that she didn't even have to try too hard to maintain, it had simply fallen into a kind of pleasing habit for all of them.

* * *

It was a bitter night late in October when she had the dream for the first time in so long, and a wind blew and battered about her and Sam's little house so fiercely that the old windows seemed to breath and sigh. She dozed the rest of the night listening to in hazy alarm, dreaming again as she did that there was something watchful about the storm, something predatory and keen-eyed. The day drew up clean and bright though, the next morning, and her room was about her present and correct.

The morning is icy outside, the light through her window bright from reflecting off an early frost, and the old furnace with all it's banging and bluster is as usual not equal to warming her room at the top of the house. She pulls her favorite sweater from the bedpost and sits and shivers for a while, putting off leaving the bed clothes until the last possible moment. She knows exactly how long each morning task should take and she counts it off in her head, watching the red numbers of her alarm clock, hunched over her pulled up knees in a light, muzzy doze. When she has only five minutes to spare for just in case, she wills herself upright at last, bypassing the cold wooden floor to slide her feet straight into her wooly slippers and on downstairs for a breakfast she's too tired and disturbed to want.

She hears voices talking low as she descends, but Sam is almost always on the phone to Vic, his partner in crime, or to Suzanne, or even to client, at this time, setting up the game plan for the day. She doesn't think anything of it. She has to remember where she set the car keys last night, and she has to remember to get her social studies book actually back in her backpack, and she has to plan her arrival to first period so that Josh Starnes can't corner her and ask her out again. She's trying so, so hard not to think of the dream and the fire up the walls and the clench of terror that her body still remembers. She isn't paying attention.

She draws up short at the doorway to the kitchen and the big cosy nook where they eat breakfast every day. Her dad is talking, yes, but it's not on the phone. He's cooking up eggs on the stove, she finds the scent faintly off-putting but sweetly familiar, as she does every morning, and so he doesn't notice that she's come down. The stranger does though, he turns and sees her right away, with such a strange look on his face.

He isn't an imposing figure, the man at the kitchen table, not exactly. But the air of the familiar room is different with him sitting there. He's so poised and dressed so smartly in a dark gray suit that she's left with the strong sensation that he's stepped out of a book or a movie, he seems so out of place. His crisp appearance and able grace, instantly recognizable as wealth and self-assurance, seems to cast the cheery brightness and shabbiness of the kitchen, the whole house, into stark relief, making it seem as cheap and exaggerated as the backdrop of a play. She is rendered mutely horrified to be still in her pajamas and moth-eaten thrift store sweater, before her shower, and on the verge of running late for school. He is so very, obviously not one of Sam's clients, or associates, or even one of his marks, the ones she pretends not to know about, and those are the only possible categories of strangers known to her dad that she can think of.

He's fairish haired, with a long, intelligent, watchful face and a stubborn chin, and his eyes seize on her immediately, as she stands dumbly in the door, and go wide in something like shock. The mug in his hand he'd been lifting to his mouth comes back to the scarred oak table with a thump. He watches her for a long moment with an expression she can't quite read, but it's so sharp that she takes a step back before recovering her nerve.

"Um… Hi," she says, doubtfully, and looks to her dad for some kind of a cue.

"Oh, good morning, sweetie, I didn't think you'd be down yet," says Sam over his shoulder as he divvies scrambled eggs onto three plates. "This is my old friend Raymond. He's come for little visit."

He's using that talking to the client voice, that smoothing over the cracks voice. She doesn't like it when her dad talks to her that way, it always means there's something going on that he doesn't want her to know about, and it's almost always something bad. She also knows that that voice means she shouldn't make a scene or indicate she knows anything's up in front of any outsiders in their midst, so she frowns to herself but keeps her mouth shut. What kind of friend is never mentioned and yet comes to visit unannounced before eight in the morning, she wonders.

"Okay," she says, and looks between the two of them, fails to draw any immediate conclusions, and gives up.

She strides past the stranger with forced nonchalance and pours herself some coffee into her favorite green mug, that her dad had set next to the percolator as usual. She fixes her toast and pours milk in her coffee and generally pretends the stranger isn't there, trying to move about with as much carelessness and poise as can be managed at 7:15 in the morning when she's badly slept and badly rattled. She fights to urge to try and fix her hair. The stranger is sitting in her usual spot at the breakfast table, and this breaks her out of her pretense as she stands there with her dishes, stumped and perturbed. After a second's hesitation, she takes her dad's usual spot, opposite him.

"I'm sorry for intruding on your home at such an uncivilized hour and with no warning," says Raymond, "I'm afraid that, circumstances being what they are, I had no choice."

His voice is soft and lowish, his intonation is surprisingly melodious and quite refined. He's from the Northeast, she guesses, just like Sam was, long ago, so maybe he really is an old friend. Her dad doesn't seem to be agitated by having him here, kind of edgy, but not antagonistic. She looks back and forth between them again, wondering.

"Like I said before, Ray, I'm glad you're here. I think you're being a little paranoid, sure, but it's good to see you. It's been too long," says Sam.

"It's not paranoia, Sam, I promise you that it isn't."

"Let's just eat breakfast, okay, and we can talk about this after Elizabeth goes to school."

"Paranoid about what?" she asks seriously. Mainly she wants to remind them that she's in the room and that talking over her head this way is irritating, but she also wants to know what they've talking about. She hasn't got high hopes that either of them will actually tell her anything, not without much more badgering than she's got time for, but it's worth a try.

"Perhaps Sam is right, I would hate ruin your breakfast with unpleasant talk," says Raymond with a level look and a polite smile in her direction. "However, I think it would be better if you stayed home from school today, Elizabeth. I was just trying to convince your father to phone in on your behalf."

"The quarter's ending in a few days," she protests, thinking of the hours of studying she has done in the last days that will have to be done over if she has to reschedule the last round of tests, the effect on her GPA if she misses them altogether, "there are finals, I have to be there."

"And I would never stand between a young student and her education, if I didn't have reason to believe your safety was at stake," he says, full of sober import and portentousness.

"Don't scare her, Ray, you don't really know that there is any risk at all," her dad counters, sounding like he's losing grip on his temper. "We talked about this. Let Elizabeth go to school and take her tests and we'll ease into all this tonight after you've explained to me in detail exactly what you think is going on."

"Will someone just explain to me what is going on here?" she asks, fed up and starting to get genuinely worried. She looks between her dad and Raymond and feels her stomach sink with their wary, shifty, apologetic looks. They're not going to tell her anything, she realizes, to them she's still just the kid at the table.

"Perhaps you and your father are right, you have an important day at school, you'd better get ready. I will tell you everything this evening, Elizabeth, isn't that right, Sam," says Raymond, with a stern look at her dad, "And I think it would be better if you didn't take the bus today, Sam can drive you instead."

"I haven't taken the school bus since we moved to the county," she says crisply, "I have a car, and the first thing my dad taught me after how to shift gears was how to tell if someone was following me. I'll be fine. And you, whoever you are, had really better not be lying about telling me everything."

She leaves her breakfast dishes and darts upstairs, trying to focus on the ticking clock of the impending school bell and the first period social studies test that will tank her grade for the quarter if she misses. She has practice. She's used to going to school and pretending that her dad's world doesn't exist so that she can concentrate and move with ease among her peers. But the stranger, the overt nature of his warning, those are going to be a lot harder to ignore than the familiar gamut of oddities.

Sam's friend Raymond had said to her, _danger._ The old, dark and choking dream had come to her and said, _danger._ She set out into the grey and shining day with her books and her good heavy coat against the breath of frost, her customary music in the tape deck, all the usual things of an autumn morning. But even so insulated she felt a dread coming on like a distant rumbling, the breathless night dread her old companion.


End file.
